Grokkist Press
Reading Room
Snackables
Things we found elsewhere and pass on: a film, a tool, an essay, a corner of the old internet. A few lines on why, then off you go. New ones join the shelf as we find them, newest first.
11 Aug 2024
A curated collection of stylish and quirky typefaces available under a variety of free licences, many free for commercial use. Sort by cursive, display, monospace, sans serif, serif or slab. If you're the kind of person for whom this is catnip, prepare to lose several happy hours.
Read the note ↗11 Aug 2024
'English as my first language makes me a member of a tiny elite — 300,000 people in a country of 1.4 billion… yet in today's Hindu-nationalist India, English is a defence of pluralism against the imposition of a single Indian language on a country with dozens of mother tongues.' A highly r
Read the note ↗11 Aug 2024
Photographer and designer Milie (aka Princess Prompt) used Midjourney and Magnific to imagine The Simpsons as real people: 'I didn't want them to have yellow skin — I wanted us to see them as people we could meet in everyday life.' Plenty of fun examples, plus a peek into her workflow and
Read the note ↗28 Jul 2024
A personal and philosophical meditation on why we seek out the pleasures of fear — headlong through bungee jumps and haunted houses, or from the safe distance of a horror film. 'Fear is an oddly attractive force… why do we crave small doses of terror?' Ginger Greene wonders whether practis
Read the note ↗28 Jul 2024
Shot with light and electron microscopes at magnifications up to 50,000x, Nanoscapes reveals the elaborate topography of butterfly wings — and the surprisingly little-known story of structural colour, where hue comes not from pigment but from the shape of matter itself. Visually stunning,
Read the note ↗28 Jul 2024
When companies testify in open court, the public gets rare insight into how things actually work. Drawing on the 2022 Penguin vs DOJ antitrust case, this lays bare the book industry: the Big Five spend most of their money on advances for celebrities and franchise authors, and make their re
Read the note ↗28 Jul 2024
An interactive art experience in Singapore where you wander through giant inflatable rock formations, setting the wilderness against the urban. It pays homage to Iwagumi — the Japanese art of stone placement in aquascaping, pioneered by the legendary aquarist Takashi Amano — which 'strives
Read the note ↗28 Jul 2024
A charming, uplifting stop-motion animation about the healing power of knitting and other fibre arts — and about mending objects rather than discarding them. 'People need something that's for them, just to concentrate on. When your life is sort of falling apart, you need to create a purpos
Read the note ↗14 Jul 2024
The Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was the first river in the world granted legal personhood; for Māori, it is a living being — an ancestor. This documentary follows river guardian Ned Tapa as he invites a First Nations elder from Australia and his daughter, activists fighting for
Read the note ↗14 Jul 2024
A deeply considered reflection on computers as a kind of divination — a way of knowing with subjective validity and narrational depth, and a form of collective care — and whether technology can care for us without really understanding us. 'Under the hoods of my digital oracles lie models w
Read the note ↗14 Jul 2024
Václav Havel's reflection on his improbable path from imprisoned poet-playwright to president of Czechoslovakia. 'The true art of politics is the art of winning people's support for a good cause, even when the pursuit of that cause may interfere with their particular momentary interests' —
Read the note ↗14 Jul 2024
Were the Middle Ages a funny time? You bet. Medieval LOLs is a seven-episode LRB series in which historians Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu close-read some of the rudest, silliest and most surprising works in English literature in search of the medieval sense of humour. Inevitably it s
Read the note ↗